In the months after the capitulation of France to the Germans in June 1940,
Simone Weil wrote a remarkable essay on the Iliad, Homer’s account of
the ferocious assault on Troy by the Greeks.1 There was just one hero in
this war, she judged – not Achilles, the champion warrior of the Greeks, not
Agamemnon, their commander, nor even King Priam of Troy or his brave
son Hector. ‘The true hero,’ she begins her essay, ‘the true subject, the centre
of the Iliad is force.’
For Weil, force is a fundamental structuring condition of human relations.
Our interactions all take place in the shadow of this transforming agent – ‘that
x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing’. Taken to its limit,
she says, it turns a human being into a thing quite literally: ‘it makes a corpse
out of him.’ The Iliad is replete with scenes of humans being reduced to mere
matter. The ‘noble drivers’ of the chariots who are slain on the battlefield lie
there, ‘dearer to the vultures than to their wives’. Hector’s corpse is dragged
behind Achilles’s chariot. His wife, not knowing of his demise, has the maids
prepare a hot bath for him, but ‘already he lay, far from hot baths.’ ‘Nearly all
of human life,’ Weil remarks, ‘then and now, takes place far from hot baths.’
What concerns her just as much as the brutal killings in war is the exercise
of force in the many other circumstances of common life: the relations of
domination, of oppression, of threat. Nobody is spared from this. ‘Perhaps
all men,’ she muses bleakly, ‘by the very act of being born, are destined to
suffer violence.’ And even those who are victors in one moment may well be
victims in the next. The joy of victory is only ever short-lived. What perdures
is the relentless dehumanising drive, the reduction of persons to things, that
infests social interaction even in times of peace.
There is a related judgement, though more political than ontological, in
Hannah Arendt’s account of the dehumanisation of minorities as totalitarian
regimes take shape. To appear as a bearer of rights one must belong to a political
community – must share in its discourse, be recognised as an equal, and live
under its laws; but with a totalitarian government, those who fall outside the
dominant community may be stripped of their ‘right to have rights’2. The
sovereignty of each individual turns out to be radically subordinated to the
state’s sovereignty. And so, undesirable people may be rendered ‘stateless’,
giving the lie to the Enlightenment promise of ‘inalienable rights’. Without
the recognition and protection of a state, a person is expelled from the realm
of the bios politikos – full, politically embedded human life – and reduced to
a kind of mere humanity.
Weil and Arendt, in their different ways, displayed a more widely felt
disenchantment with modern rationality. The Frankfurt School leaders,
particularly Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, similarly believed it had
failed in its promise, and intimations of the same verdict were apparent in
post-war existentialism, sociology, and political theory, as well as in literature
and theology. The two world wars, the Holocaust, other genocides, the
expansion of consumer capitalism, and the tight bureaucratic management
of society – all of these demonstrated the purely instrumental nature of much
public reasoning. It had become the opposite of what it promised. Instead of
bringing emancipation, it brought domination. It put into effect a totalising
logic of technocratic efficiency and social control. And when that’s how the
thinking goes, the intrinsic worth of every human being is forgotten, and the
solidarity of humanity is no longer persuasive. War, and all the destruction it
brings, becomes more thinkable.
According to the most recent Global Peace Index,3 there are nearly sixty
‘active state-based conflicts’ in the world at present, the most since the end
of World War II. ‘This is the 13th deterioration in peacefulness in the last 17
years,’ the report notes, adding that levels of militarisation are up, conflict is
more international, and the successful resolution of conflicts is at its lowest
point in fifty years. As Pope Leo remarked to the diplomatic corps in January,
‘war is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading.’4 A diplomacy that seeks
consensus, he lamented, is being replaced by ‘a diplomacy based on force’;
the only peace it seeks is the submission of the enemy ‘as a condition for
asserting one’s own dominance’.
The pope was even more direct in his Palm Sunday homily on 29 March.
No one can use Christ to justify war, he insisted: ‘He does not listen to the
prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: “Even though you
make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood”’ (Isa 1:15).
This was not, as some Catholics thought, a repudiation of just war theory. The
moral context of just war theory has always been that war is tragic, always a
condition in which grave injustices thrive – the dehumanisation of combatants,
their desensitisation to cruelty, and the infliction of violence on civilians, to be
sure, but underlying these there is the unleashing of what St Augustine calls
the libido dominandi,5 the lust for domination. And so the bar for a just war is
set exceedingly high. It is intended to restrain, not to legitimise.
What makes all wars morally perilous is the near impossibility of
maintaining jus in bello, right conduct during war, even when there
is a reasonable claim to jus ad bellum, the right to go to war in the first
place. But how far beyond any commitment to right conduct have we
gone when the most powerful president in the world threatens to destroy a
whole civilisation, or when his secretary of defence takes pride in an army
characterised by ‘maximum lethality, not tepid legality’ and rejects ‘stupid
rules of engagement’ that would tie the hands of his soldiers, all the while
invoking ‘God’s almighty providence’. And language of this kind is no longer
exceptional: a Hezbollah leader declares that the people of Israel will pay
the price for their government’s belligerence – effectively echoing Osama
bin Laden’s repeated insistence after 9/11 that as the American people voted
for their government they are not innocent; Netanyahu tells his forces as
they invade Gaza to remember God’s command in the Book of Samuel to
annihilate the Amalekites, their men, women, and children, and even their
farm animals; his finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, insists that starving
two million Gazans might be ‘justified and moral’; Russian politician and
former president Dmitry Medvedev refers to some Ukrainians as ‘various
cockroaches that have bred in the Kyiv insectarium’ – the list is long. Nor
does it stop at rhetoric, of course: there are reports from most present-day war
zones of the strategic use of sexual violence, the abduction of children, the
summary execution of civilians, and the blocking of humanitarian aid. It is
exceedingly rare that armed forces, no matter how good their claim to jus ad
bellum, manage to show restraint, proportion, and respect for noncombatant
immunity.
Targeting civilian populations and destroying towns, villages and all
the infrastructure they rely on is by no means a new phenomenon. In a
recent work, Irish economic historian Cormac Ó Grada revises upwards the
received figures for the deaths of noncombatants during the two world wars
of the twentieth century. Including all causes – bombing campaigns, famine,
disease, genocide – the civilian death toll of World War I numbers between
15 and 20 million, and that of World War II comes out between 45 and 50
million. And clearly this is not all ‘collateral’ damage. As Ó Gráda writes,
Both world wars caused several famines. Both spawned
genocides, above all the Jewish Holocaust. Both targeted civilians
as a means of winning: during World War I through blockades
and forced labour, during World War II through expropriation and
far more forced labour, and through aerial bombing on a massive
scale, culminating in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in early August 1945.6
How can we account for the ease with which the world reverts to such
nihilistic brutality in times of war? It’s important first to note that this
dehumanising tendency is not confined to combatants. War evidently brings
on a decisive change in attitude among the civilian populations too. Ó Gráda
again:
During World War II, more so than during World War I, most
if not all the warring parties countenanced civilian deaths on
a mass scale. Lofty prewar commitments to sparing civilians
evaporated once the dogs of war were let slip. Given the lack of
an enforcement mechanism, laws agreed upon in peacetime were
nearly always broken whenever they got in the way of military
goals. Meanwhile, both sides accused the other of atrocities
against civilians and reaped the propagandistic rewards to be had
from such claims. Eventually civilians, too, called for retaliation
and revenge against enemy civilians. War transformed how people
felt about civilians …7
Which brings us into the realm of a particularly disquieting aspect of
the mysterium iniquitatis, the mystery of human evil: How is it possible
that people who seem to live ethically during the ordinary course of their
lives, people who are consciously committed to a moral code, find it easy to
perpetrate or at least to defend the most heinous of crimes in wartime and
beyond? Or as the subtitle of American psychologist Albert Bandura’s book
on the subject goes, how do people ‘do harm and live with themselves’?8
Bandura notes that ‘people do not usually engage in harmful conduct until
they have justified to themselves the morality of their actions’. He then charts
and classifies the multiple strategies by which they construct ‘persuasive self-
exonerations’ in order to selectively disengage from the moral dimension
of violent behaviour. They resort to euphemistic labelling, for example
(collateral damage, surgical strikes); or they claim the actions are justified
by religious ordinance (jihad, crusade); or are necessary for a higher purpose
(defending freedom, combating evil, creating a better peace); or they deflect
responsibility (‘the government has its reasons’, ‘they gave us no choice’,
‘it’s in God’s hands’); or they dehumanise or demonise the victims (the
Gazans are ‘human animals’, migrants are ‘the worst of the worst’); and so
on. J. D. Vance’s notorious distortion of the concept of the ordo amoris,
reducing a brutal deportation policy to the playing out of ordered Christian
love, checks a number of these boxes.
There is a powerful counterimage to Vance’s in a late essay by Simone
Weil, published posthumously in Awaiting God.9 She recalls a detail from
the medieval legend of the Grail. That miraculous vessel, guarded by a
king who, as punishment, was afflicted with an excruciating wound, would
belong to the first seeker who saw the king suffering and asked him, Quel
est ton tourment? – ‘What is your torment?’, ‘your agony?’, sometimes
translated as ‘What are you going through?’ It is the compassionate question
of a person who pays attention and shows concern for a sufferer – a real
person, right here, right now, grieving, starving, lonely, wounded, homeless,
despairing, living in fear. Weil remarks, ‘The love of our neighbour in all
its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going
through?”’10
This is the precise opposite of the moral disengagement that animates
and legitimates wars and that perpetuates structural injustice in times of
peace. It is a refusal to allow suffering to remain invisible.

Perhaps the most appalling theatre of war in the world at present is the
Gaza strip in Israel, where the Palestinian people have endured relentless
genocidal destruction at the hands of the Israeli military. The most recent
bout was triggered by Hamas murdering over 1,000 Israeli citizens on 7
October 2023 and taking around 250 hostages, but it must be remembered
that Israel created the oppressive conditions in Gaza, beginning in 1948, and
has sustained a particularly brutal assault on the territory since it withdrew
its troops in 2005. In ‘Monopolising Victimhood’, David Neuhaus SJ, who
was himself born into a German-Jewish family in South Africa and has lived
much of his life in Israel, rejects the exceptionalism of political Zionists who
believe the state of Israel ought to be exempt from accountability and who
refuse to extend to the Palestinians the recognition of victimhood that they
claim for Israel itself. Neuhaus emphatically acknowledges that the Jewish
people have suffered persecution of the worst kind down the centuries,
culminating in the murder of millions by the Nazis in the Shoah, but he
insists that ‘the fight against antisemitism and the fight for the freedom,
Studies • volume 115 • number 458
169Editorial: Summer 2026
equality, rights, and dignity of Palestinians are both part of one and the
same struggle: a struggle for a world free of injustice, racism and violence
of any kind.’
In ‘The US–Israel War against Iran: The Politicisation of Religion’, James
Kelly also addresses the situation in Gaza, as well as the related conflagrations
in southern Lebanon and in Iran. He traces the way in which many of the
belligerents in the Middle Eastern wars, including the Americans, call on
religious history and prophecies and on images drawn from eschatological,
messianic, and apocalyptic traditions, all as a way of legitimising their stance.
It is a dangerous practice, he judges, and it contributes to the political and
moral chaos that threatens to engulf us.
In Tobias Winright’s view, the ‘collapse of restraint’ in present-day wars
that has led to high casualty rates among the most vulnerable civilians is an
argument for reclaiming the just war moral tradition rather than abandoning
it. In particular, he argues in ‘Just War and the Vulnerable: Women and
Children’, it is essential that belligerents uphold the principle of noncombatant
immunity.
Wars can have victims far from the battlefield too. In ‘Secondary
Victims: Exploring Collateral Poverty and the Iranian Energy Shock’, Kevin
Hargaden and Ciara Murphy draw attention to the devastating impact that
the US-Iranian struggle to control the Strait of Hormuz is having on many
Irish homes, leaving a great number of families vulnerable to fuel poverty.
Ireland’s heavy reliance on fossil fuel energy is now exposed as a critical
weakness, and the argument for a just transition to renewable energy has
never been more persuasive.
In ‘History during Wartime’, Neasa MacErlean notes the close connection
between the study of history and the formation of perspectives that give rise
to wars. Without rigorous and independent historical scholarship, nations are
left vulnerable to the ‘war-justifying narratives’ of politicians and ideologues.
She recounts the development of a more scientific and objective historical
tradition in Ireland, in which her grandfather, Robert Dudley Edwards, played
a decisive role, and she argues that it is a blame-free rather than value-free
approach. As such, it has the ability to further greater mutual understanding
between nations and even to prevent wars.
The failure to pay close attention to concrete instances of human suffering
is not limited to war scenarios, of course. When one forms one’s understanding
and takes one’s guidance from a grand narrative or a conceptual whole, it may
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happen that the experience, especially the suffering, of this or that person
is overlooked – inattentively reduced to its place in the scheme of things.
According to the present writer in ‘Suffer the Little Children: The Fate of
Unbaptised Infants’, this happened in Christian theology in relation to infants
who died before they could be baptised. The normative weight of tradition,
narrowly understood, kept the Church from responding appropriately to
pastoral experience and the grief of parents until quite recently.
In his poem ‘The Blood of the Children Is Crying to Me from the Earth’,
John F. Deane also calls to mind the unbaptised infants forbidden burial in
consecrated ground and so buried instead in a cillín – a marginal ‘place of
sorrow’ where they lie ‘lorn and unnamed’. He brings this image together
with another excruciating image of suffering and sorrow, the murdered
infants of the genocide in Gaza – ‘innocence wrapped in small packages of
the whitest linen’. The poem finishes with a prayer that the ‘plea for justice’
would be heard by ‘the One, the All, / that you stay close to us in our coming
in, in our going out’.
Another failure to extend due care to sufferers is the subject of Keith
Adams’s essay, ‘Beyond Binaries: The Psychiatric Prisoner as Victim’. He
notes that there is a growing number of ‘mentally disordered offenders’ in
Irish prisons, and that the prison system does not cater at all adequately for
people with severe mental illness. The Irish government is ‘more content to
punish people with psychiatric illness than to care for them’, Adams argues,
adding that many prisoners with psychiatric illness are victims who are
exposed to further victimisation.

In the next section of this issue of Studies, there are essays relating to
Irish literature, history, and public policy. Breffni Martin provides a short
biography of his father, Augustine Martin, academic, senator, and editor of
the Leaving Cert poetry anthology Soundings, well known to school-goers in
the last decades of the twentieth century. Kevin Whelan traces the tension in
the Irish Church as English ecclesial forms were introduced into Ireland after
the Norman conquest, and he follows the developments that led to the Gaelic
system being superseded in the days of the Counter-Reformation by Roman
and anglicised forms. In ‘Waking James Joyce: A Dublin Vignette’, Thomas
O’Grady provides an insight into how James Joyce was seen by other writers
and artists in Dublin, by following the stories of a small group that gathered
in an art emporium in 1941 when the discussion turned to Joyce.
In 2024 and 2025, Cambridge University Press published two of the
Gospels, John and Matthew, richly illuminated by calligrapher Jane Sullivan.
Sullivan is interviewed here by Susanne Jennings, in ‘“When you write very,
very slowly, the song of the letters hums in the silence”: An Interview with
Jane Sullivan, Calligrapher’. In ‘Where Now for Citizens’ Assemblies?’,
Edmond Grace SJ explains the history and the rationale behind the various
structures designed to enrich deliberative democracy by increasing citizen
participation as a way of addressing a decline of public trust in government.
Finally, in ‘Concentrated Wealth: How the “Greatest of Plagues” Has
Deeply Infected Global Politics’, a review article that covers three books
concerned with economic and power inequalities in the contemporary world,
Peadar Kirby connects wealth inequality with the obsession with ‘endless
production’ and with nationalism, leaving us, as Pope Leo has surmised,
‘in deep trouble’. Kirby finishes with Pope Francis’s judgement in Fratelli
Tutti that ‘inequality and lack of integral human development make peace
impossible.’
Notes
1 Simone Weil, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, trans. by Mary McCarthy (Pendle Hill, 1991; 1st
edition, 1956).
2 See in particular Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt Brace & Co., 1973.
Originally published in 1948), pp. 296–298. See all of Chapter 9; ‘The Decline of the Nation-State
and the End of the Rights of Man’.
3
See www.visionofhumanity.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Global-Peace-Index-2025-web.df
4 Pope Leo XIV, ‘Address of Pope Leo XIV to Members of the Diplomatic Corps Accredited to the
Holy See’, speech, 9 January 2026, www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/speeches/2026/january/
documents/20260109-corpo-diplomatico.html
5 See especially St Augustine, The City of God, Book I and XIX.
6 Cormac Ó Gráda, The Hidden Victims: Civilian Casualties of the Two World Wars (Princeton
University Press, 2024), p. 3.
7 Ó Gráda, The Hidden Victims, p. 2.
8 Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live with Themselves (Worth
Publishers, 2016). See especially Chapter 2, ‘Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement’, pp. 48–103.
9 Simone Weil, ‘School Studies and the Love of God’ ,in Awaiting God, trans. by Bradley Jersak (Fresh
Wind Press, 2012).
10 This version is from the 1951 translation by Emma Crauford, titled Waiting for God and repub